The number-crunchers at Gartner are predicting worldwide AI-optimised Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) spending will grow 96 percent, to $US42 billion, this year.
Market growth is also anticipated to keep going up next year, with total spending hitting $US66 billion.
Hardeep Singh, senior principal research analyst at Gartner, said the growth is being fuelled by infrastructure demand for large language model training, as well as operationalisation of AI across enterprise applications and workflows.
“As organisations shift from model development to production-scale deployment, fine-tuned and domain-specific models (DSMs) are increasingly integrated into customer-facing and operational systems, requiring continuous, real-time execution rather than periodic training,” said Singh.
“This shift is accelerating the cloud consumption patterns and creating sustained demand for AI-optimised infrastructure.”
In 2026, global spending on inference ($US23.3 billion) will surpass that of training ($US19 billion), according to Gartner.
Fifty-five percent of AI-optimised IaaS spending is forecast to support inference in 2026 and is set to reach 59 percent in 2027. The growing share of inference workloads is expected to reshape cloud investment priorities.
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